Mills College WeeklyI’m relatively new to the Mills community, but I am certainly
NOT new to the concept of “customer service.” With that said, will
someone PUH-LEASE tell me what’s going on with the service in the
Tea Shop after 6 p.m.?
So, here’s what happened that prompted me to write this
letter:
It was 7 p.m. and I was starving because I hadn’t eaten all day.
I ran over to the Tea Shop to grab dinner. When I walked in there
were two girls standing at the register talking. I looked over at
them, waited for eye contact, then walked over to the grill. Now,
at this point I’m sure it was clear that I was not a newly hired
fry cook and therefore not in the position to go behind the counter
and prepare my own meal. After a few moments, I looked back and the
two girls were still talking with no intention of stopping and at
that moment I saw someone standing behind the large storage
refrigerator peeking around the corner. Peeking!
After several minutes, because by now the moments had become
minutes and the growling of my stomach was getting louder. I found
myself staring at the girl behind the refrigerator because I was
trying to convince myself that she was honestly not hiding back
there but perhaps checking the Freon level or something.
By then, the two girls at the register stopped talking and one
walked away, dispelling my belief that they were both workers.
Quite the contrary, one was working, or at least supposed to be,
and the other was loafing. I guess in theory they were both
loafing. So, I had to ask myself one question. What’s really going
on? I was dealing with what appeared to be two employees of the Tea
Shop loafing and hiding and no one coming to provide me the service
of preparing a turkey burger. I immediately had a flash back to a
day at the DMV where the line is wrapped around the building and
there are only three employees working and one was the phone
talking to her girlfriend about the soap opera story line for the
day.
Did I mention that one of the employees was actually HIDING
behind that refrigerator? HIDING. Do you hear me?
Okay, now I am getting mad and wishing that there was a
McDonald’s within walking distance. My focus moved away from the
loafer at the register to the hider behind the refrigerator.
“Are you open?” I asked and do you know what she said? Yes. So,
she admitted that she should have come over to find out what I
wanted but she opted to HIDE instead. Did I mention she was HIDING
behind that refrigerator?
Anyway, she finally saunters over (and I mean the kind of
saunter where you can tell that doing her job was the last thing on
her mind). By then I was so frustrated I chose to have a cup of
chili instead. She slowly scooped the remaining chili from the
bottom of the pan and three scoops later filled my cup. I snatched
the chili and stomped over to the register, like a child in the
midst of a temper tantrum, paid the bill and stomped out of the Tea
Shop.
What is the moral of this story??? Some of the girls in the Tea
Shop are in dire need of customer service training and HIDING girl
needs to be reprimanded for not even being slick enough to hide
discretely. Maybe she should be forced to spend a day at the DMV
and see how it feels to be ignored. Or maybe I have it all wrong
and the Tea Shop’s primary mission is to sell tea and food service
is secondary.
